Georges Méliès was one of the most prolific early filmmakers. He and his collaborators produced more than 520 short films in France between 1896 and 1913. In this presentation, Matthew Solomon (University of Michigan) will discuss Méliès’ extraordinary career as a magician, caricaturist, and filmmaker, while considering his relationship to the nineteenth-century tradition of science fiction and the Incoherent art movement. The presentation will include screenings of two of Méliès’ fantastic voyage films, A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902) and AN IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE (1904).

Matthew Solomon, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, where he teaches film history and theory. He is the author of Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century, winner of the Kraszna-Krausz award for best moving image book in 2011, and of the BFI Film Classics monograph The Gold Rush, published in 2015. He is the editor of Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon, the 2011 book for which he also produced an accompanying critical edition DVD.

Free and open to the public. Space is limited. Please click here to RSVP or contact 202.633.2241.

Distinguished Iraqi poets Amal Al-Jubouri and Dunya Mikhail and Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here project founder and coordinator Beau Beausoleil, along with musicians Michael Pestel and Philemon AbdEllah Kirlles will commemorate the March 5, 2007 bombing of Baghdad’s historic book selling street. A book signing will follow the reading.

This event is part of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here DC 2016. Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here DC 2016is a book arts and cultural festival organized for January through March 2016, throughout the Washington, DC area. Exhibits, programs, and events will commemorate the 2007 bombing of Baghdad’s historic bookselling street, and celebrate the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, to stand in solidarity with the people of Iraq, who have endured so much; and with people at home and abroad who are unable to make their voices heard. Book sellers, who survived the bombing, rebuilt their stores and are once again in business. They sell works by Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, and Jews, children’s books, and progressive publications from around the world.The Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here project began as a call from San Francisco poet Beau Beausoleil in 2007 for writers, and it quickly moved on to incorporate artists, artist books and printmakers all who are responding to bear witness to a tragic loss of a center of literacy and humanity in Iraq. Al-Mutanabbi Street represents a street of booksellers, printers, and readers, a street where people still felt “safe” among all the words and books. This is the project’s starting point: where language, thought, and reality reside; where memory, ideas, and even dreams wait patiently in their black ink.

Project Partners

George Mason University’s School of Art and George Mason University Libraries, Split This Rock, Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, McLean Project for the Arts, Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at The George Washington University, Busboys and Poets, Georgetown University, Cultural DC, Smithsonian Libraries, Brentwood Arts Exchange, Northern Virginia Community College, George Mason University Student Media and Fourth Estate Newspaper.

Support

Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here DC 2016 is made possible in part by grants from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities. Additional support received from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at George Mason University. Busboys and Poets and The Bozzuto Group are also major sponsors.